TAAG is one of those web tools that survived long enough to become history without ever stopping being useful.
Open the Text to ASCII Art Generator
Patrick Gillespie first posted TAAG — Text to ASCII Art Generator — in May 2007. His own blog explains that the project grew out of nostalgia for the “Macro Shop” text art that circulated on AOL in the late 1990s and an idea he had been carrying around since roughly 2000.
The original version was a small JavaScript experiment. Gillespie described it as unfinished, unpolished and mostly for fun.
Then he kept working on it.
Within a month he had added support for FIGlet fonts, alignment, smushing, categories and author information. By 2008 TAAG could generate PNG images from ASCII-art output. Years later, the tool was still running while most of the social spaces that inspired it had disappeared or been rebuilt beyond recognition.
The web app became a font archive
TAAG matters because the output is only half the story.
The other half is the font material that accumulated around it.
FIGlet already had a rich text-art ecosystem, but Gillespie was also interested in harder-to-find AOL fonts. In 2026 he went even further and added proper support for TheDraw font files, including color. TheDraw was a DOS ANSI-art program whose font format supported the extended character set and 16 colors familiar from BBS-era artwork.
That means a JavaScript toy written while relearning the language ended up bridging multiple generations of text graphics: AOL macros, ASCII art, FIGlet and ANSI/TheDraw fonts.
The site itself also documents how web development changed around it. Old blog posts talk about testing in Internet Explorer, switching development work to Firefox and Opera because of their error consoles, and trying interface effects that felt cutting-edge in 2008. The 2025 rewrite moved TAAG to TypeScript after more than a decade without a major overhaul.
There is useful preservation hidden in that continuity. Fonts that were once casual decoration inside chat rooms and BBS culture can become difficult to identify once their original software disappears. A living tool gives those formats another place to remain visible.
This is exactly the sort of long-tail technical-cultural page that makes the Ancient Web worth indexing. The artifact is not merely old code. It is a functioning bridge back to the places where the code’s visual language came from.
Some websites preserve documents.
TAAG preserves the giant block letters people used to yell with.